Opinion | ‘Make No Apologies for Yourself’

The seven poems you will find here below, as well as seven others that will follow in a second post, were curated by us over the past several months, and represent only a small segment of poets with disabilities writing vital, engaged and powerful work today. To arrive here, we asked many disabled poets to offer their work, and this process raised issues that permeate debates in the disability community. We learned that some poets prefer not to claim disability as an identity, publicly or at all, and because this is a “disability” series, those poets did not wish to offer their work. We were also faced with questions raised in the recent and provocative debate between “disability poetics” and “crip poetics”: Who is the audience? Are we writing for other disabled people? For the nondisabled, or for everyone? How do we write for both while emphasizing the disabled poet’s aesthetic?

Our goals here are many. In curating this group of poems, we want to show aesthetic range, thematic variety, and formal power. We don’t want to repeat the ableist claims that appear so often in the media, even sometimes in this paper, that disability is a condition to be cured; Deafness is a condition to be cochlear-ed. These claims are ignorant of disability pride, Deaf pride, and our culture. In offering this work, we reject the stereotypes and misconceptions disabled people deal with every day from nondisabled people, and even from other disabled people. We refuse to box the poems in by requiring a fidelity to subject. It is enough that the poets say: I am disabled and/or Deaf. The poems can do anything.

We are grateful to Jennifer Bartlett and Peter Catapano, who edited the first poetry collection for this series in August 2018. We believe these poems express complexity, nuance, joy, tenderness, love, incisiveness and brilliance. We hope you will take them in, read them with the care with which they were written and selected, and understand that we disabled people do not just deserve or ask for the right to exist in this world with the same dignity and respect nondisabled people receive. We demand it.

Nina Puro

FROM ABOVE

This room’s a long way from when I was the iceblue shadow pooled inside a centerof gravity I left in the shapeof a body Shivering madeits own music Sirens chippedbits from our borders Looped gutswere a harmonica Don’t say we’ve nothingto live for We are I goback twenty kitchensago, stare out In my sleep Our skins rotatetoward sun A president is a boatwe didn’t pay for We don’t chooseto get on My mouth anarchipelago Your bones a schoolof fish A country what won’t unyokeslicked in our floating rib That hookshine’s a lit kitchen from a frost-hardroad Built by slaves The smokeof the world is never still My stomach fullof twigs cracking I mean I’m filling outthe forms Her bones glow underground The foxes are back Everythingmight spill Sorry am I talkingtoo quiet too fast too [] A body drainedof a name again A name spilledmilk again Paper money We age stringing chairto chair under florescence Office ERlaundromat Thus silver ripplesthrough generations You’re justanother year moving throughlike a cold front I’m just another namefor meat Last year crouchedunder the newish war and chugged

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

WITNESS

for Monica

On the anniversary, I drive along a spine of mountains in an old blue truck through a purple desert, darkening indigo. My throat unrolls a fist of smoke. Around my wrist, a silver snake and when the pines appear, there you are among the long black trunks, storm-grey eyes. You wave in the door’s mouth. A shepherd dog stands beside you. your hair is longer now, and you’re holding a knife, thumbing blades of aloe to take to your mother. You tell me I look dimmer, like the light in me is underwater. The same song and a pair of boots by the bed. You braid my hair at the table, ask about the baby. The windows reflect a photo that isn’t there. I tell you about the miles of empty, broken chairs along the side of the road. You stack young firewood in the iron pit. We throw coins into the fire and talk on the porch through the night. In the canyons, wolf eyes like sapphires. I keep remembering the water is boiling. On the stove, a pot, filled with cold water. I put down the lid, but somehow, I know the phone is still ringing inside.

Meg Day

DEAF ERASURE OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE TSA AGENT AT ATLANTA INTERNATIONAL

This is the good news: [inaudible]& we have a plan for you. Can you follow

they need the room. [Inaudible]. Okay that’senough. I need to go & tell them what I’ve seen.

Danez Smith

A LITTLE WEALTH & IT DIES

the olives! they won’t let them harvest the olives!yes, if you want to kill a people you have to starvethe wallets too. yes, in the nice hotel in the airportlounge my leather bag my headphones someone’srent my skymiles & i feel it bubble. who caresif the world ends if it ends over there? who caresif the apocalypse after we fat on duck & gin? try again.

if god is the first mirror, i’ll pay for my heaven in cash.bet he say nigga with an -erlike i do, now.

Cade Leebron

A TOAST DELIVERED FROM MY FLOOR MATTRESS

To the blue sunrises when I hear hervoice in my ear, saying alcohol isa depressant, there is a reason forhow low I feel. To the mornings I wisha human into my bed, a cactusonto my nightstand. To the early kindof awareness, the graying skylit hush,clouds, the vaguely hungover bodymind.To the whole concept of mimosas, hairof a classier dog than what I bit.To teenage chaos, to the truth or darephase, the cigarettes we pre-New Year’s liton the porch at that house party. It’s alla myth, this growing up thing, a close call.

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Kelly Davio

ETYMOLOGICAL NOTE

Before the seventeenth century,the English language had no nounfor comfort. No way to describe

that state of better-off-nessfor sleeping on a bed of haythan on a bare plank. No word

to express how much that hay’stexture might be improvedwithout the creep of insect

or midnight scuttle of mouse.Comfort was only a verb—to solace,to strengthen, to give what aid

or blessing one could againsta hemorrhagic wound or lungsplitting with rot. To be

that it is body still, she asks if Iam comfortable. I say yes, reach outmy silent hand for touch.

Glenis Redmond

DEAR YOU,

Make no apologies for yourselfBecause you are covered by a listening skinBecause every ache you feel is not your ownBecause of your mother’s lossand your father’s rageBecause of how many rivers they’ve crossedBecause you plummet even if you cannot swimBecause of the lynching treeBecause when you enter bookstoresbooks fall off shelves into your open palmsBecause you ask questions of the universeso the world opens before you like a page of textBecause of those clouds and that murder of crowsBecause poets are your wounded idolsBecause the truth, even if it hurts is to be cherished and heldBecause when people die you believe that they walk with you dailyBecause the river has a mouth that speaks their namesBecause the river flows with storiesBecause you sit on the shore and listenBecause alone is more comforting than togetherBecause your pen is oceanicBecause you are big-eyed and eyes wideBecause you suffer from what you see and hearBecause you have sinus arrhythmiayour heart is linked to your breathand your breath is short,Because asthma is only one of the monkeys on your backBecause your heart is the vehicle you choose to ride this go ’roundBecause it can go forward and backwards in timeBecause bookstores have always been oraclesBecause poetry is your archeological toolBecause you dig and diveand you trust the ride of journal and journeyeven if you don’t always floatBecause your heart beats to your breathBecause of this music, you dance raw and wild

Meg Day is the author of the book of poems “Last Psalm at Sea Level.” They teach at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

Kelly Davio is the author of “Burn This House,” “It’s Just Nerves,” and the forthcoming “The Book of the Unreal Woman.” She is a medical editor who lives and works in London.